How to Get Your CVPR Paper Rejected?

Ming-Hsuan Yang
Outline
• Conferences
• Journals
• Writing
• Presentation
• Lessons
Conferences
• CVPR – Computer Vision and Pattern
Recognition, since 1983
– Annual, held in US
• ICCV – International Conference on Computer
Vision, since 1987
– Every other year, alternate in 3 continents
• ECCV – European Conference on Computer
Vision, since 1990
– Every other year, held in Europe
Conferences
• ACCV – Asian Conference on Computer
Vision
• BMVC – British Machine Vision Conference
• ICPR – International Conference on Pattern
Recognition
• SIGGRAPH
• NIPS – Neural Information Processing
Systems
Conferences
• MICCAI – Medical Image Computing and Computer-
Assisted Intervention
• FG – IEEE Conference on Automatic Face and
Gesture Recognition
• ICCP – IEEE International Conference on
Computational Photography
• ICML – International Conference on Machine
Learning
• IJCAI, AAAI, MVA, ICDR, ICVS, DAGM, CAIP,
ICRA, ICASSP, ICIP, SPIE, DCC, WACV, 3DPVT,
ACM Multimedia, ICME, …
Conference Location
Conference Location

• Me and confernece I want to attend (location

vs. reputation)
Conference Organization
• General chairs: administration
• Program chairs: handling papers
• Area chairs:
– Assign reviewers
– Read reviews and rebuttals
– Consolidation reports
– Recommendation
• Reviewers
• Authors
Review Process
• Submission
• CVPR/ECCV/ICCV
– Double blind review
– Program chairs: assign papers to area chairs
– Area chairs: assign papers to reviewers
• Rebuttal
• Results
Area Chair Meetings
• Each paper is reviewed by 2/3 area chairs
• Area chair make recommendations
• Program chairs make final decisions
• Virtual meetings
• Onsite meetings
– Several panels
– Buddy/triplet
Triage
• Area chairs know the reviewers
• Reviews are weighted
• Based on reviews and rebuttal
– Accept: (decide oral later)
– Reject: don’t waste time
– Go either way: lots of papers
• Usually agree with reviewers but anything can
happen as long as there are good justifications
Conference Acceptance Rate
• ICCV/CVPR/ECCV: ~ 25%
• ACCV (2009): ~ 30%
• NIPS: ~ 25%
• BMVC: ~ 30%
• ICIP: ~ 45%
• ICPR: ~ 55%
• Disclaimer
– low acceptance rate = high quality?
 CVPR
2500 16.00%
Submission 2123
14.16% Oral
14.00%
2000 1933
11.90%
1798 1807
1724 1677 12.00% 11.62%11.40%

1593

1500 1450 10.00% 9.27%

1250 8.15%
1160 1131
8.00%
1000 6.63%
6.38%
1000 920 905
5.76%
6.00% 5.40%
4.77% 4.80%
4.52%
4.21%
551 544 3.95%
453 504 466 4.00% 3.52% 3.34% 3.30%
500 2.48%

2.00%
0 0.00%
96 97 98 99 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 96 97 98 99 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15
50.00% 47.21%

45.00% Overall
40.00%
35.00% 31.80% 31.89%
30.68%29.76% 29.88%
29.67%
30.00% 28.02%28.12%28.24% 28.40%
26.00% 26.41%26.74%26.12% 26.25%
24.86% 24.06%
25.00% 23.09%

20.00%
15.00%
10.00%
5.00%
0.00%
96 97 98 99 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15
 ICCV
Submission Oral
1800 1698 9.00%
1629 8.00%
1600 8.00% 7.45% 7.55%
1400 1327 7.00%
1230 1190 1216
1200 6.00%
966
1000 5.00% 4.45%
3.95%
800 4.00% 3.66% 3.62% 3.70%
3.30%
550 575 596
600 3.00% 2.52%
400 2.00%
200 1.00%
0 0.00%
98 99 01 03 05 07 09 11 13 15 98 99 01 03 05 07 09 11 13 15
40.00%
34.40% Overall
35.00%
30.36% 30.30%
30.00% 28.35% 27.96%27.90%

25.00% 23.53%23.21%
20.60%19.84%
20.00%

15.00%

10.00%

5.00%

0.00%
98 99 01 03 05 07 09 11 13 15
 ECCV
1600 20.00% 19%
Submission 1437 1444
18.00% Oral
1400 16%
1174 16.00%
1200
14.00%
1000 900 12.00%
871
800 10.00%
600 555 8.00% 8% 7%
600
6.00% 4% 5%
400
223 266 4.00% 3% 3% 3%
200 2.00%
0 0.00%
98 00 02 04 06 08 10 12 14 98 00 02 04 06 08 10 12 14

60.00%
50.22% Overall
50.00%
43.61%
40.00% 37.67%
34.23%

30.00% 27.90% 27.43% 28.39%

25.07%
21.44%
20.00%

10.00%

0.00%
98 00 02 04 06 08 10 12 14
Top 100 Publications - English
• For what it is worth (h5 index by Google
Scholar)
1. Nature
2. The New England Journal of Medicine
3. Science
…
55. IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and
Pattern Recognition (CVPR)
…
Top Publications - E&CS
1. Nano Letters
…
8. IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and
Pattern Recognition (CVPR)
...
16. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and
Machine Intelligence
…
Reactions
• Top journal papers
• Workshops vs conferences
• Waiting for the review or final results
• Acceptance
• Reject
• Mixed feeling
• Finding an error
• Resubmit?
• This time, it will go through
• Paper finally accepted
• Registration
• Oral presentation
• Poster presentation
Database Community
• Jeffrey Naughton’s ICDE 2010 keynote
• What’s wrong with the reviewing process?
• How to fix that?
Journals
• PAMI – IEEE Transactions on Pattern
Analysis and Machine Intelligence, since 1979
(impact factor: 5.96, #1 in all engineering and AI,
top-ranked IEEE and CS journal)
• IJCV – International Journal on Computer
Vision, since 1988 (impact factor: 5.36, #2 in all
engineering and AI)
• CVIU – Computer Vision and Image
Understanding, since 1972 (impact factor: 2.20)
Journals
• IVC – Image and Vision Computing
• TIP – IEEE Transactions on Image Processing
• TMI- IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging
• MVA – Machine Vision and Applications
• PR – Pattern Recognition
• TMM – IEEE Transactions on Multimedia
• …
PAMI Reviewing Process
• Associate editor-in-chief (AEIC) assigns
papers to associate editors (AE)
• AE assigns reviewers
• First-round review: 2-4 months
– Accept as is
– Accept with minor revision
– Major revision
– Resubmit as new
– Reject
PAMI Reviewing Process
• Second-round review: 2-4 months
– Accept as is
– Accept with minor revision
– Major revision (rare cases)
– Reject
• EIC makes final decision
• Overall turn-around time: 6 to 12 months
• Rule of thumb: 30% additional work beyond a
CVPR/ICCV/ECCV paper
IJCV/CVIU Reviewing Process
• Similar formats
• Slightly longer turn-around time
Journal Acceptance Rate
• PAMI
– 2013: 151/959: 15.7%
– 2014: 160/1018: 15.7%
• IJCV: ~ 20% (my guess, no stats)
• CVIU: ~ 25% (my guess, no stats)
From Conferences to Journals
• How much additional work?
– 30% additional more work for PAMI?
– As long as the journal version is significantly
different from the conference one
• Novelty of each work
– Some reviewers still argue against this
– Editors usually accept paper with the same ideas
How to Get Your CVPR Paper Rejected?

• Jim Kajia (SIGGRAPH 93 papers chair):

How to get your SIGGRAPH paper rejected?
• Bill Freeman: How to write a good CVPR submission
• Do not
– Pay attention to review process
– Put yourself as a reviewer to exam your work from that perspective
– Put the work in right context
– Carry out sufficient amount of experiments
– Compare with state-of-the-art algorithms
– Pay attention to writing
Review Form
• Summary
• Overall Rating
– Definite accept, weakly accept, borderline, weakly reject, definite
reject
• Novelty
– Very original, original, minor originality, has been done before
• Importance/relevance
– Of broad interest, interesting to a subarea, interesting only to a small
number of attendees, out of CVPR scope
Review Form
• Clarity of presentation
– Reads very well, is clear enough, difficult to read, unreadable
• Technical correctness
– Definite correct, probably correct but did not check completely,
contains rectifiable errors, has major problems
• Experimental validation
– Excellent validation or N/A (a theoretical paper), limited but
convincing, lacking in some aspects, insufficient validation
• Additional comments
• Reviewer’s name
Learn from Reviewing Process
• Learn how others/you can pick apart a paper
• Learn from other’s mistakes
• Get to see other reviewers evaluate the same
paper
• See how authors rebut comments
• Learn how to write good papers
• Learn what it takes to get a paper published
Put Yourself as Reviewer
• Reviewer’s perspective
• How a paper gets rejected?
• What are the contributions?
• Does it advance the science in the filed?
• Why you should accept this paper?
• Is this paper a case study?
• Is this paper interesting?
• Who is the audience?
Novelty
• What is new in this work?
– Higher accuracy, significant speed-up, scale-up,
ease to implement, generalization, wide
application domain, connection among seemingly
unrelated topics, ...
• What are the contributions (over prior art)?
• Make a compelling case with strong
supporting evidence
Experimental Validation
• Common data set
• Baseline experiment
• Killer data set
• Large scale experiment
• Evaluation metric
• Realize things after submission
• Friendly fire
Compare With State of the Art
• Do your homework
• Need to know what is out there (and vice versa)
• Need to show why one’s method outperforms others,
and in what way?
– speed?
– accuracy?
– sensitive to parameters?
– assumption
– easy to implement?
– general application?
Writing
Writing
Writing
• Reviewing a poorly written paper
• Clear presentation
• Terse
• Careful about wording
• Make claims with strong evidence
Writing
• Matt Welsh’s blog on scientific writing
• Sharpen your mental focus
• Force you to obsess over every meticulous
detail – word choice, word count, overall tone,
readability of graphs (and others such as
font size, layout and spacing, and page limit)
Writing
• Crystalizing the ideas through the process of
putting things together
• Hone the paper to a razor-sharp, articulate,
polished work
Writing
• Write the paper as early as possible,
sometimes before even starting the research
work
• Will discover the important things that you
have not thought about
• The process of writing results in a flood of
ideas
Writing
• Even if a paper is not accepted, the process is
energizing and often lead to new ideas for the
next research problems
• Submitting the paper is often the start of a new
line of work
• Riding on that clarity of thought would emerge
post-deadline (and a much-needed break)
Tell A Good Story
• Good ideas and convincing results
• But not too much (vs grant proposal)
Presentation
• Good artists copy, great artists steal
• Not just sugar coating
• Not just a good spin
• Tell a convincing story with solid evidence
• Present your ideas with style
• Q&A
• Real stories
Interesting Title
• Cool titles attract people
• Grab people’s attention
• Buzz word?
• But don’t be provocative
Math Equations
• Minimal number of equations
– No more, no less
– Too many details simply make a paper inaccessible
• Too few equations
• Many good papers have no or few equations
– CVPR 13 best paper
– CVPR 05 HOG paper
Figures
• Be clear
• Sufficient number of figures
Theoretical or Applied?
• Computer vision is more applied, at least
nowadays
• Theory vs real world
• More high impact papers are about how to get
things done right
Common Mistakes
• Typos
• Unsupported claims
• Unnecessary adjectives (superior!)
• “a”, “the”
• Inanimate objects with verbs
• Inconsistent usage of words
• Laundry list of related work (or worse copy sentences from
abstracts)
• Bad references
• Laundry list of related work
• Repeated boring statements
Get Results First than Writing?
• Conventional mode
– Idea-> Do research -> Write paper
• “How to write a great research paper” by Simon Peyton Jones
– Idea -> Write paper -> Do research
• Forces us to be clear, focused
• Crystallizes what we don’t understand
• Opens the way to dialogue with others: reality check, critique, and
collaboration
• My take
– Idea -> Write paper -> Do research -> Revise paper -> Do research ->
Revise paper -> …
Supplementary Material
• Important
• Add more results and large figures
• Add technical details as necessary (don’
t miss important details)
• Derivation details, e.g., proof of a theorem
Most Important Factors
• Novelty
• Significant contributions (vs.
salami publishing)
• Make sure your paper is non-rejectable (above
the bar with some error margin)
Reviews
• Me: Here is a faster horse
• R1: You should have used my donkey
• R2: This is not a horse, it’s a mule
• R3: I want a unicorn!
 Rebuttal or Response

Good surprise Bad surprise

• One CVPR paper: BR, BR, DR Two ECCV papers: PA, PA, BR
• Two ECCV paper: PR, PR, BR One CVPR 15 paper: WA, BR, BR -> Poster, Poster, WR
• One CVPR 15 paper: BR, BR, WR -> poster, poster, poster One CVPR 16 paper: WR, WR, BR
• One CVPR 15 paper: DR, WA, BR -> Poster, Poster, WR
Never Know What will Happen
Masked Meta-Reviewer ID: Meta_Reviewer_1
Meta-Reviews:
Question
Consolidation Report
All reviewers agree that this paper has moderate novelty of using partial and
spatial information for sparse representation. However, they also concern about
- unclear presentation on technical details (eg. definitions, inference algorithm,
pooling methods, template updating schemes, experimental settings etc.),
- not extensive experimental comparison (needs tests on more challenging
videos),
- missing justification of the assumption (complementary nature of two kinds of
pooling features) and the efficacy of each term.

The authors rebuttal addresses most issues, but is not sufficient to ease the
main concerns of R1 and R2. So, the AC recommends the paper to be rejected
as it is.

Decision
Definitely Accept
Challenging Issues
• Large scale
– CVPR 2011 best paper: pose estimation
– CVPR 2013 best paper: object detection
• Unconstrained
• Real-time
– CVPR 2001: face detector
– CVPR 2006: scalable object recognition
• Robustness
• Recover from failure
Interesting Stats
• Best papers and top cited papers in computer s
cience
• Best papers = high impact?
• Oral papers are more influential?
• CVPR Longuet-Hggins prize
• ICCV Helmholtz award
Data Set Selection
• NIPS 02 by Doudou LaLoudouana and
Mambobo Bonouliqui Tarare, Lupano
Tecallonou Center, Selacie, Guana
• The secret to publish a paper in machine learni
ng conferences?
• Read the references therein carefully!
Data Set Selection
Data Set Selection
Data Set Selection

(originally) [6] ... a egotistical view of bragging and boasting.....

Where Is My Advisor?
Ask Someone to Proofread
• Certainly your advisor
• Polish your work
• My story
Paper Gestalt
Paper Gestalt
• CVPR 10 by Carven von Bearnensquash, Dep
artment of Computer Science, University of Ph
oenix
• Main Point: Get your paper looking pretty
with right mix of equations, tables and figures
Tools
• Google scholar h-index
• Software: publish or perish
• DBLP
• Mathematics genealogy

• Disclaimer:
– h index = significance?
– # of citation = significance?
Basic Rules
• Use LaTeX
• Read authors’ guideline
• Read reviewers’ guideline
• Print out your paper – what you see may NOT be
what you get
• Submit paper right before deadline
– Risky
– Exhausting
– Murphy’s law
• Do not count on extension
Lessons
• Several influential papers have been rejected
once or twice
• Some best papers make little impact
• Never give up in the process
Karma?
Your Advisor and You
• Suggesting a research topic
• When your advisor presents your work
• When you explain your work
• Demos
• Good results
Start Working Early!
• Write, write, write…
• Ask others for comments
Work Hard in the Summer
Quotes from Steve Jobs
• “ I'm convinced that about half of what separates
successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful
ones is pure perseverance. ”

• “ Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask

creative people how they did something, they feel a
little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just
saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a
while. ”